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By Root 4607 0

poison the relationship between the emerging dominions. If Chittagong was only joined to East Pakistan by a thread of land, India’s great northeastern provinces of Assam and Manipur were equally tenuously linked to West Bengal by a thin strip squeezed between East Pakistan to the south and the independent Himalayan states of Nepal, Sikkim and Bhutan to the north. The populous district of Sylhet, formerly part of Assam, also opted for Pakistan after a plebiscite. The importance of all this was that India’s northeastern section of the old British crescent was distanced even further physically and psychologically from the rest of the country. Unsurprisingly, this encouraged some local leaders, particularly among the Naga peoples, to think in terms of total independence from India. It also ensured that the Indian authorities and the Indian army became even more concerned to make their presence felt in Assam and Manipur for fear of Pakistani and, later, Chinese interference in these distant provinces. As elsewhere down the crescent, partition and the creation of new independent states sparked many small wars of secession.

In part this was because the British and Christian missionaries had always treated peoples such as the Nagas and Garos, or equally the Kachin and the Chin in Burma, differently from the Indians and Burmese of the ‘plains’. Most local leaders felt that they had been conquered by the British, not by the Indians or Burmese, and they therefore saw nothing automatic about their incorporation in the post-British states. Roving British anthropologists had sought to protect their culture from ‘pollution’ by mainstream Hindu or Muslim society. In the case of the Nagas, American Baptist missionaries had protected them against the British civil administration and encouraged them to evolve an identity as a chosen people of God, distinct from the pagans of the Assam valley.36 By 1947 probably a majority of Nagas were Christian. This sense of separate identity had been strengthened during the war when many of them had fought against the Japanese on the Allied side. British officers had armed them and taught them that they were independent people and owed nothing to the seditious nationalists of the plains. Naga political associations gradually came into being, some pressing for local autonomy, some for outright independence. In July 1947, just as Radcliffe was passing through Delhi en route to Calcutta, a delegation came to meet the Congress leadership and seek guarantees for an independent Nagaland. Initially Gandhi seemed to accept this, stating that Congress wanted no one to be forced into the Indian Union. But by August the Congress leaders were rattled by the prospect that riot and secession would fragment the whole subcontinent. Their position hardened, provoking some Naga leaders to issue their own declaration of independence on 14 August. In contrast to the wild celebrations elsewhere in India, very few attended the flag hoisting in Nagaland. According to Mildred Archer, art historian and wife of W. G. Archer, a local official and anthropologist, ‘not a single Naga was anywhere in sight’.37 The messianic prophetess Gaidiliu, who had led a Naga rebellion against the British in 1930, remained in prison until 1948 at the behest of the suspicious Indian authorities. Decades of conflict, sabotage and insurrection were to follow in the northeast.

The haste to partition Bengal might have made it look as if the eastern part of the province were being abandoned, but some preparations had at least to be seen to be made. The middling-sized town of Dacca was designated the capital of East Pakistan. In the eighteenth century Dacca had been a major city in the Moghul province of Bengal, but with the rise of Calcutta it had lost its importance and become an undistinguished district headquarters noted mainly for its university and periodic flooding. Already tense from minor communal incidents, the town was sadly lacking in facilities for the large number of Muslim clerks and officials who were congregating there from all over Bengal.